Ellen Glasgow Quotes

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind'. These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.